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I recently wrote a long article about improving your play here: X
In it is a couple definitions you gotta understand before reading the rest of the blog:
- Micro - Micro is defined to be the orders given to any individual unit (or moving building) during gameplay. This includes walking commands, as well as attack, patrol, hold position, and any spells cast or abilities initiated.
- Macro - Building, constructing, or queueing the correct things at the correct times and in the correct locations.
- Mechanics - The ability the player has to translate what they want to happen in the game into the necessary actions via user-interface.
Back in Brood War there was a selection cap of 12 units. This alongside with the much more clunky unit pathing resulted in a much higher level of refined mechanics to simply move your army around, when compared with army movement tasks in SC2. In SC2 you box over or CTRL/Shift click your units then a move them in it's simplest form. In brood war you had to bind every group of 12 units to a unique control group, then a-click for each individual one for every single time you want to attack-move your army. Lots of players would spam 4a5a6a7a8a or something similar before game to warmup for that task. On top of all this in Brood War you also had to have, for instance, only your templar selected to cast spells, where in SC2 you can select lots of types of units and still have the ability to cast spells.
Due to the necessity of much more refined mechanics to play Brood War at a decently interesting level, you had a lot of players developing their mechanics much farther than the vast majority of where SC2 players currently lay with their mechanic's level of refinement. This makes intentionally improving mechanics a lot harder, as players now have to choose to improve them on their own rather than having the game force them into doing so.
The lower mechanics level requirement allows for much more interesting play to arise from much less skilled players in SC2 when compared to Brood War, thusly appealing to a much wider audience of players resulting in more revenue generated. The current state of SC2 also provides little incentive for players to improve their mechanics at all up until the professional level.
Though, what if I want to improve my mechanics in that I control my army with multiple control groups? If you can control your army in SC2 with multiple control groups you have a major advantage over 99% of players on the North American server. Although at best I simply use three different control groups for my main army, 2 other for warp prisms and one for an observer. Idea: what do you think about having a switch in your options menu that allows you to enable a custom selection cap? What if I could input into a text field a selection cap of my desired value (which would be 12 in this example), so that I can only select 12 units at a particular time? What this would do is force you to control your army in multiple control groups, thus allowing you to easily gain familiarity with moving your hand about the numbers 1-0 fluidly.
The reason having a customizeable value is superior to SC2's current state is that you wouldn't have to worry about how many units you box over, as you'll only select 12. If you wanted to try this sort of exercise out right now, then in-game you'd have to focus on selecting small amounts of units instead of playing, and I don't think it would really benefit the player much.
Note: Additionally it would be nice to have two different text fields, one for building selection cap and one for unit selection cap.
And lastly, I don't know about you all, but it would be ridiculously nostalgic having an optional 12 unit selection cap. Nostalgia points ftw 
 
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Very intriguing idea. It would be awesome for Blizzard to implement this idea, though they're plate is full of other problems to fix. However, perhaps a bored programmer on a slow day could implement this idea a few years from now after the other issues are fixed.
I know that the SC2BW mod/maps have options to turn on a 12 unit selection limit and to turn off MBS, though B.net 2.0's forced latency make these options a bit cumbersome to use in multiplayer due to the scripting being a bit sluggish due to the latency.
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It would be a nice idea, more customization is always nice! However as eviltomahawk said I'm pretty sure Blizzard is working on other larger tasks at the moment, so I wouldn't hold my breath. As for nostalgia points, go play SC2 BW :D You can have your limited unit selection AND no mbs, auto mine, etc. It's a sick map actually haha
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Very interesting post and cool idea. I would guess that very few players would opt to limit their control group size in ladder/tournament matches, but it would be a good idea for practice. I am one of those players who is afflicted with one control group syndrome and something like this could certainly help remedy that.
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I want to bump this one time, as I think it was lost pretty quickly without many people taking a look. I'm pretty interested in hearing other peoples' thoughts about this idea, and would be a little disappointed if I miss out on some replies because I got unlucky with having it buried in the thread listing.
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I like this idea a lot, however I think you'd have more luck attempting to have it implemented in the form of a custom map solely for training purposes, rather than actually incorporated into the game itself.
The SC2:BW maps have a selection limit of 12, I'm sure it couldn't be too much of a step further to have that 12 limit be customisable.
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I'd hate to see this implemented honestly. I can see in custom games such as the BW maps TL has shown on TL Attack but to change the game like that would be a disaster for me. The game is so much harder when your limited on how many units you can select and ultimately it would be a huge downfall for me and almost all players who didn't play BW.
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On June 15 2011 16:34 Tegin wrote:
I'd hate to see this implemented honestly. I can see in custom games such as the BW maps TL has shown on TL Attack but to change the game like that would be a disaster for me. The game is so much harder when your limited on how many units you can select and ultimately it would be a huge downfall for me and almost all players who didn't play BW.
don't read thread. make post anyway.
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That's how i practice mechanics to be honest. I just play a couple of games of BW on the abyss. it helps a shit tonne with micro too. I think you should just make yourself only grab like 20 units at a time and have like 4 hotkeys for your army
even just 1a 2a 3a can help you win battles because you flank a lot more and better. you bomb if you want, and get better concaves faster.
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i like the idea but blizzard won't implement that. but there could be custom maps having that - sc2bw has it in and if you would talk to the sc2bw creator he could probably put the "no-mbs" and the "12-unit-cap" on regular sc2 maps.
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I do agree it would be easier to just create a custom map for this feature, though that defeats the purpose of being able to implement in areas such as ladder or on other 1v1 maps created. I fully understand that this is highly unlikely to be implemented since there are so many other things that are higher priority, but I still believe that it would be lovely indeed to have.
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I kind of agree with you cecil. I've found that flanks and unit postioning in SC2 just feel much less refined and just plain less used because of the ease of boxing your units and going. If you used 3-4 hotkeys for a zerg army, flanks would seem more nautral, and getting a larger concave would be almost second nature, since if you were controlling your army with that many groups, it would move as a wave, and not a glob.
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I've never understood the viewpoint of some people that the game should just be about strategy and not actual speed or mechanics...
look at at game like counter-strike... you can have the best strategy in the world but if you aren't good at aiming you're going to lose...
mechanics are important... wish people would realize that 
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On June 21 2011 17:46 -orb- wrote:I've never understood the viewpoint of some people that the game should just be about strategy and not actual speed or mechanics... look at at game like counter-strike... you can have the best strategy in the world but if you aren't good at aiming you're going to lose... mechanics are important... wish people would realize that
I think as time progresses it will become easier for people with solid mechanics to be able to shine through those without. For now since everything is new and all people with good strategies or good strategic decisions will be able to take a lot of games off of the more solid players.
On June 21 2011 17:43 susySquark wrote:
I kind of agree with you cecil. I've found that flanks and unit postioning in SC2 just feel much less refined and just plain less used because of the ease of boxing your units and going. If you used 3-4 hotkeys for a zerg army, flanks would seem more nautral, and getting a larger concave would be almost second nature, since if you were controlling your army with that many groups, it would move as a wave, and not a glob.
Yeah, I agree with that as well. Especially if you factor in the differences in unit pathing. Really I don't think it would be a problem if I could figure out how to use superior mechanics to gain a larger advantage over people who can't even have 3 army groups. Lately I've been using warp prisms late game a whole lot, and using DTs during the mid-game, and that seems to be working really well. It will just take some time.
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I agree with this wholeheartedly. More hotkeys, boxing and selection is really really fun. I don't think the ability to have your entire army on one key really fits with the theme of starcraft, or even RTS in general.
I need help people, I'm trying to change the control group limit in the sc2 editor down to 24 units per control group. I've been going through blizzard and independent forums on how to do this, but they're not too helpful.
Does anyone know? Or know someone who does? Thanks.
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EPT
